Today's Paper

‘Grievance Day to ensure transparency’

Coimbatore: Scores of petitioners met and interacted with Director of Town and Country Planning Pankaj Kumar Bansal on Tuesday on a ‘Grievance Day’ organised here in view of a large number of applications that were found to be pending at this centre.

The objective of such an exercise by the Local Planning Authority (LPA) is to assess the functioning of the department at the field level, identify problems, classify them by their nature and to ensure transparency, Mr. Bansal said.

He met more than 100 petitioners in the forenoon and scheduled a next session post-lunch to deal with the rest. During the day, officials assessed the nature of the issues to be sorted out.

The time taken for each application was reviewed. Similarly, applicants were given additional information on queries raised in their applications. Some of them pointed out that they had not received any intimation about queries they had raised in their applications.

Tuesday’s exercise helped monitor the time-span taken by officials at the field level to dispose of applications in each category.

Mr. Bansal said the e-governance drive proposed by the Town and Country Planning has been entrusted with the Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu. ELCOT had been asked to speed up the work so that applicants could get to know the status of their applications quickly.

There was a felt need to ensure transparency by keeping the applicant informed on the status, since processing of applications by the LPA and the Town and Country Planning Department involved coordination with more than one department.

Mr. Bansal said the list of files in process, numbering around 650, had been displayed on the notice board with individual status.